5 Things I found out in Hong Kong

ONE. I can't speak Chinese. Obvious I know, huh? However, this certainly became clearer surrounded by Cantonese and understanding lots, but not actually being able to put what I needed to say together properly. Life fail.

TWO. To my surprise there are Mandarin speaking people everywhere. This includes "has no idea" woman who replaced "onto it guy" calling out numbers at yum cha. You can't call out numbers only in Mandarin. Not fair.

THREE. There are heaps and heaps of people. Like, HEAPS. I certainly do not remember this from my trip there years ago. We were in Mong Kok and were shocked to be swept up in a tidal wave crowd of people. We even had to ask if it was "normal".

FOUR. I am not as weird as I thought- being in my 20's and still holding on to a passionate love of Hello Kitty and all things cute, you often get certain 'wow that's a bit funny/weird' vibes from people. Almost everyone has laughed at my Hello Kitty phone case *sad face*. Going to Hong Kong has confirmed my suspicion that Asians have an inbuilt gene to love cute stuff. It was everywhere- from an air hostess with bear earrings to old people with Mickey Mouse t-shirts to bank promotions. And I freakin loved it.

FIVE. It's really easy to get around. And the city isn't scary. The train is great and is almost on par with Bangkok's BTS. Their Airport Express puts Sydney to shammmme. I'm not even going to bother comparing Vietnam.

Chicken with no head please

Every so often I ask my maid to help me buy groceries and things from the market (even after all this time it's still daunting). This time I asked her to asked her to buy a whole chicken. I spelled it out in vietnamese and did a google image search and pointed to a chicken. She pointed to the rooster. I pointed to the chicken.

In this process as best I could I mimiced without the head. She totally got it. Of course, westerner, no head.

The next day she arrived with bags of things and took me through them. At the very end she said "chicken!". "Chicken!" I exclaimed in my own head. She pointed to the bag acted out a head being cut off before opening it up and pulling out...the chicken's head.

She looked at me again and mimiced the head being cut off.

That's what I wanted right?

*On a side note, it wasn't actually it was a rooster. Do not ever buy/eat rooster. Even after I steamed it, removing the meat off the bones was an Olympic event.

Drunk baby

We had dinner with the Dines last night and found out what happens when a ice-cream loving baby eats slightly alcoholic ice-cream.

This:

And now a slightly less "...now let me tell YOU something" shot:

As you can tell, Maya has lost alot of weight since last time.

So we went to Bali and Singapore

...and Bali was surprisingly awesome. Yep, people do love it for good reason.

And then there was Singapore. I don't know what I loved more, Gardens By The Bay or eating way too much chilli crab. My guess for Johnny that it was buying not 1, but 3 pairs of shoes (in less than an hour).